Lady Connie eBook

iron will to succeed. There was even a certain
bitter satisfaction in measuring himself against the
world without the props and privileges he had hitherto
possessed. He was often sore and miserable to
his heart’s depths; haunted by black regrets
and compunction he could not get rid of. All the
same it was his fixed resolve to waste no thoughts
on mere happiness. His business was to make a
place for himself as an able man among able men, to
ask of ambition, intelligence, hard work, and the
sharpening of brain on brain, the satisfaction he
had once hoped to get out of marriage with Constance
Bledlow, and the easy, though masterly, use of great
wealth.

He turned to look at the clock.

She had asked him for five. He had ordered his
horse accordingly, the only beast still left in the
Flood stables, and his chief means of escape during
a dreary fortnight from his peevish co-executor, who
was of little or no service, and had allowed himself
already to say unpardonable things about his dead
brother, even to that brother’s son.

It was too soon to start, but he pushed his papers
aside impatiently. The mere prospect of seeing
Constance Bledlow provoked in him a dumb and troubled
excitement. Under its impulse he left the library,
and began to walk aimlessly through the dreary and
deserted house, for the mere sake of movement.
The pictures were still on the walls, for the sale
of them had not yet been formally sanctioned by the
court; but all Lady Laura’s private and personal
possessions had been removed to London, and dust-sheets
covered the furniture. Some of it indeed had been
already sold, and workmen were busy packing in the
great hall, amid a dusty litter of paper and straw.
All the signs of normal life, which make the character
of a house, had gone; what remained was only the debris
of a once animated whole. Houses have their fate
no less than books; and in the ears of its last Falloden
possessor, the whole of the great many-dated fabric,
from its fourteenth century foundations beneath the
central tower, to the pseudo-Gothic with which Wyatt
had disfigured the garden front, had often, since
his father’s death, seemed to speak with an
almost human voice of lamentation and distress.

But this afternoon Falloden took little notice of
his surroundings. Why had she written to him?

Well, after all, death is death, and the merest strangers
had written to him—­letters that he was
now wearily answering. But there had been nothing
perfunctory in her letter. As he read it he had
seemed to hear her very voice saying the soft, touching
things in it—­things that women say so easily
and men can’t hit upon; and to be looking into
her changing face, and the eyes that could be so fierce,
and then again so childishly sweet and sad—­as
he had seen them, at their last meeting on the moor,
while she was giving him news of Radowitz. Yet
there was not a word in the letter that might not
have been read on the house-tops—­not a